Application of low cost IoT device for precise monitoring of Temperature and Humidity of Server Rack in Data Center

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to all the devices which are present in the world and connected to the Internet. The aim of IoT is to collect and share data between two devices using the Internet. The gathered data thus helps in further improvement of the system design. It is making tremendous progress in the past few years, and has proved itself very useful in realization of many low cost real life applications. It is going to bring many disruptions in computer network communication and data analytics in the coming years.

This paper introduces a low cost IoT model to precisely monitor the temperature and humidity of the server rack in the data centre. As data centers have huge servers, it is necessary to monitor and manage the temperature & humidity from the closest proximity for better accuracy and precision. Our system is configured using the DHT 11 (Digital Humidity and Temperature) sensor, Arduino Uno development board and ethernet shield on the hardware side with embedded C code. The test setup is connected to the network, the acquired data is uploaded to the cloud (Thingspeak platform, a mathworks family product) .The logged data, and graph can be viewed seamlessly on the Thingspeak platform. This paper summarizes the retrieval, recording, and processing of the acquired temperature and humidity data of the data center using a low cost temperature and humidity sensor. As the proposed model should be in compliance with the security standards of the work center, we preferred the communication with Ethernet shield over Wi-Fi network for live monitoring from anywhere around the world.

The paper starts with a brief introduction of IoT technology and then presents a glimpse of the components used along with its technical specifications. Moving forward, the paper provide the description of test setup, introduction of the cloud based real time database followed by the working model which gives a clear idea of how the system works. In future, this system can be interfaced with commercial Air Conditioners (ACs) for automatic temperature and humidity control, thus doing away with the requirement of precision ACs for Data Center applications.